Using Plecto in Home Service: Insights from Fox Plumbing

If you’re in home service and want to learn about how Plecto helped Fox Plumbing achieve its goals of automating its data reports, obtaining digital data visualization, and improving team engagement, we highly encourage you to check out this Fox-Plecto webinar here to find out more!

Introduction

Data dashboards and home service? It sounds like an unlikely pairing. What do the trades and digital data displays have in common with each other?

We’re here to tell you that as unlikely as this pairing sounds, it’s really a match made in heaven. Here’s why:

Dashboard solutions such as Plecto allow data collection to be streamlined and automated. They reduce the time-consuming (and annoying!) process of manual data entry and reporting.

In short, by outsourcing your data collection and display needs to a digital dashboard solution, you can focus on the work that really matters.

In this article, we’ll take a look at Plecto, one of the biggest and best-known dashboard platforms and why it’s gaining a lot of traction within the home services industry.

We’ll then look at the example of Fox Plumbing, a Canadian home service firm, to see how they revolutionized their workflow—by simplifying their data collection and visualization with Plecto.

What is Plecto?

Plecto is a data solution that allows teams, companies, and other organizations to track and visualize their KPIs with digital dashboards—and in doing so, helps them make data-based decisions that drive success.

With its dashboards containing both BI (business intelligence) and gamification features, Plecto also helps create a competitive culture among employees where individual achievement can inspire and motivate others.

The idea behind Plecto is a simple one. It’s grounded in three main components that, taken together, drive business success. At Plecto, we call this the VCC Model.

Performance visualization

This occurs via the real-time and dynamic dashboards that track your KPIs and other metrics.

Coaching

With insights obtained from performance data displayed on dashboards, team leads and managers can offer guidance and action plans to employees.

Celebrating success

Live dashboards and gamified activities create a culture of encouragement and motivation, where employee accomplishments are recognized and rewarded.

Plecto as a home service tool

While it’s traditionally been used by professions such as sales, real estate, and insurance, Plecto has started to gain a lot of popularity among home service firms. Why?

Because Plecto offers a single source of truth for home service firms, which tend to have data from multiple sources that they need to organize and monitor.

These sources can be difficult to keep track of, and this problem leads directly to another: having to spend a lot of time on bookkeeping across different platforms and data sources.

Thankfully, Plecto tackles this issue by integrating with the home service industry’s favorite platforms, such as Excel, Google Sheets, QuickBooks, and ServiceTitan.

So using Plecto as this single source of truth and as a motivational tool will help you and your team:

• Obtain better business oversight with real-time dashboards.
• Reduce time spent on manual data entry with automated reporting.
• Visualize KPIs—whether sales data, technician performance, or revenue metrics.

Plecto use case: Fox Plumbing

Located in Vernon, British Columbia on the Canadian West Coast, Fox Plumbing Heating Cooling Electrical is a family-run business specializing in all areas of home service. Founded by Ted Fox in 1999, Fox Plumbing focuses on making a difference in the home service industry: creating a better place to work, offering people real careers, and providing consistently professional service to customers.

Like other team leads across the home service industry, Ted wanted to reduce his company’s dependence on Excel spreadsheets and manual data entry. And after adopting Plecto, Fox Plumbing got more than just efficient data reporting.

Plecto’s live data visualization features helped this mom-and-pop business by increasing transparency and employee motivation, while providing accurate and timely business insights to Ted and the team to help improve their decision-making process.

Fox’s four dashboards

With live data visualization being so key to Fox Plumbing’s successful growth, the firm set up four types of dashboards to help track data and boost employee performance. They are the…

Three-day call board

This dashboard automates the tracking of booked calls, helping reduce manual updates while providing real-time feedback from ServiceTitan to the team.

SWAT dashboard

This board simplifies revenue tracking while reducing the need for managers to constantly check on their team’s performance.

Sales dashboards

These provide live updates on sales goals and performance, motivating the team to achieve their targets.

Fun dashboards

These boost team morale and engagement by being visually engaging and interactive. These include the “Friday Party Time” board and welcome messages for office guests.

The home service dashboard revolution

Plecto’s dashboarding system proved revolutionary for Fox Plumbing. According to Ted, each department that got Plecto dashboards saw a 6 to 10 times performance increase.

Besides these stunning numbers, Plecto has proven true in reducing time on manual data entry and reporting—and in doing so, has allowed managers at Fox to spend much-needed time focusing on other areas of the business.

Conclusion

Sounds appealing? If you’re a home services manager or team lead and the answer is “yes,” we’d say it’s time to consider installing Plecto!

With the long-term benefits of how data visualization can improve your business performance in mind, we’d recommend starting with a few simple dashboards that address specific pain points. Once you feel comfortable with these, you can move onto more in-depth and expansive dashboards that incorporate multiple integrations and data sources.

Fox Plumbing’s Plecto success story is just one of many. As the world grows ever more digitalized, the trades have been affected by this trend too—both in the work they do, and in the tools they use to get this work done.

So why not jump ahead and get a leg up in the exciting new world of digitalized trades? Sign up here for a free 14-day Plecto trial today—and watch your home service firm match Fox Plumbing’s success!